Hunan Hanshou's vegetable industry achieves efficient development through the "three adjustments"

“Last year, the county's agricultural vegetable department introduced and promoted many new varieties with good returns, such as loose-curd cauliflower, which is planted two seasons a year and brings an average income of over 10,000 yuan per mu, much higher than the income from planting cabbage in previous years.” On New Year's Day, Qing Guangcheng, chairman of the Huacheng Vegetable Professional Cooperative in Hanshou County, was busily occupied, packing fresh tender vegetables such as loose-curd cauliflower and wrinkled-skin peppers freshly picked from the base together with cooperative members for sale to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places.

Hanshou is a major national vegetable-growing county. In 2015, the county party committee and county government made vigorously developing facility vegetables the breakthrough point for developing an efficient vegetable industry and increasing vegetable farmers' income, and determined the “three adjustments” efficient development strategy for the vegetable industry: adjusting varieties, adjusting facilities, and adjusting technology. Adopting measures such as government guidance, cooperatives as the main body, and science and technology as support, and starting with the promotion of factory seedling cultivation and mechanized transplanting, they greatly expanded the facility vegetable industry. The county established a 10 million yuan vegetable industry development fund to guide and support the vegetable industry in four aspects: facility-based production, large-scale production, factory-based production, and digitalization.

In order to optimize vegetable varieties, the county built more than 300 mu of modern seedling cultivation bases for new vegetable varieties such as Hanmei, Siyayuan, and Zhangjiacha, introduced new varieties such as high-quality yellow-heart cabbage, loose-curd cauliflower, and wrinkled-skin peppers with different maturity periods, carried out experimental and demonstration planting with success, and registered 10 trademarks including “Longyang Huacheng”, “Weidihu”, “Siyayuan”, and “Wenli Vegetables”, using points to drive broader progress and accelerating the pace of variety optimization. In 2015, among the county's vegetable area, the coverage rate of high-quality varieties reached more than 40%, and income increased by about 500 yuan per mu.

The county also adopted rewards in place of subsidies to mobilize large vegetable industry operators to vigorously develop facility vegetables and intensive seedling cultivation. Over the past year, enterprises (cooperatives) such as Hanmei, Lushu, and Chengmeng built more than 1,000 mu of new steel-frame plastic greenhouses, fully equipped with sprinkler irrigation equipment, temperature control devices, drip-free film, shade nets and so on. At the same time, through measures such as using 3,000 mu of steel-frame greenhouses as a base and cooperating with the provincial plant protection institute, the county established a vegetable pest and disease green prevention and control experimental demonstration base, vigorously promoted efficient cultivation techniques of “advancing in spring, shading in summer, and delaying in autumn”, and the annual output value of greenhouse vegetables reached more than 20,000 yuan per mu. Using the 50,000-mu contiguous vegetable base at Weidihu and the Siyayuan facility vegetable base, it carried out applications of Internet of Things technology, striving to build a demonstration county for agricultural informatization technology application in the south. At the same time, led by Siyayuan, Hanmei, and Chengmeng vegetable cooperatives, it promoted simplified and mechanized vegetable production, with annual seedling cultivation of 100 million plants and mechanized transplanting area of more than 5,000 mu, becoming a model for the promotion of new technologies in the province.

According to reports, in 2015, the county's vegetable sown area reached more than 400,000 mu and output more than 1.1 million tons, generating an output value of 1.6 billion yuan, each increasing by more than 10% over the previous year. Relying on Huacheng, Yuangui, and Hunan Province Helixing Agriculture Co., Ltd., it exported 20,000 tons of vegetables.